A sign tells scrappers to stay out of an abandoned home on Burgess Street in Detroit's Brightmoor neighborhood. / Eric Seals/Detroit Free Press

Written by

the Detroit Free Press Editorial Board

The people doing the most to tear up this city right now are scrappers — scavengers who rifle through houses, churches, commercial buildings, development projects or even light fixtures to extract slivers of precious metal they can sell.

Their abettors are the buyers: scrap metal yards throughout the city and suburbs that buy, no questions asked. Catalytic converter? Probably from someone’s car, but so what? Copper wire? Maybe from someone’s house or the transformers that power the streetlights, but so what? Doorknobs, pipes, fixtures? Undoubtedly from someplace that had a past and could have a future, if not for all the missing pieces.

The streets of Detroit are littered with the remnants of otherwise perfectly salvageable structures that have been ruined by scrapping.

It’s unconscionable on both sides of the transaction — one criminal, one accessory — and Michigan does little right now to discourage the looting.

But we’re closer to some regulatory sanity, thanks to strong efforts in the Michigan House. We just need the state Senate to come along.

Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan was in Lansing this week pushing to retain language in House Bills 4593 and 4595 that would require scrap buyers to know a little more about their customers, and keep better records of their purchases.

The House version of the legislation would prohibit scrapyards from buying obviously stolen items — such as street signs and manhole covers — would require a three-day waiting period before scrappers get paid, and would mandate that payments be made in some traceable form, not cash, to an address that’s kept on record.

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The point here is clear: Know what you’re buying and from whom.

The cover that scrapyard owners have used for years to justify their business is that they had no idea whether items were stolen or not. They were simple businesspeople conducting transactions. (Actually, that’s a ridiculous stance, in and of itself, but not worth arguing in light of the opportunity to get some progress clamping down on illegal scrapping.)

Unfortunately, the Senate sent the bill back to the House without the three-day waiting period; as a substitute, scrapyards would be required to keep a database of purchases.

In the ideal, we should require both the three-day waiting period and the database of purchases, and maybe even more. There’s nothing wrong with legitimate metal sales, and in fact, processes that “deconstruct” rather than bulldoze properties that have no future depend on smart reuse of things that have value.

But there’s also no justification for the scourge of illegal stripping that’s damaging Detroit. Why shouldn’t Detroit require the absolute height of verification that metal sales are legitimate? Why shouldn’t the onus fall hard on scrapyard operators to be sure that what they’re buying is legal, and to prove it?

The city’s not a carcass for economic buzzards, but it has been treated that way for years, thanks to perilously lax regulation of this industry.

The Senate version of the scrapping bill, without the three-day waiting period, relies purely on self-regulation by the scrapyards. That’s not good enough. The damage done to the city demands stiffer oversight, and the House bill has it.

Duggan worked the Capitol hard last week to lobby for the House version, but he shouldn’t have had to. Decency, and the willingness to help clean up an important part of the blight mess in Detroit, should compel lawmakers to enact the strongest possible crackdown on illegal scrapping.